It might be Healy-Rae country, but where else would you want to be?
Dingle, again. Other Voices again. But this time is different. This has been myself and The Boy’s thing for years now, but, finally, we are four. The Youngest is here for the first time, on the same deal that I struck with her older brother when he was in sixth year: a Friday off school on the condition that we speak Irish on the train down, and an early return on Sunday so that she doesn’t miss her exams on Monday. And The Young Adult is also making her Other Voices debut – but as a performer, not a spectator. Finally on stage in the place she spent so many of her childhood summers, in this town we love so well. We couldn’t be more excited.
She is worried nobody will turn up to her first gig, but we reassure her that these days, every Music Trail gig is rammed. Gone is the time when people just rambled around the town, dropping in and out of gigs as they stumbled across them. Now it’s all wristbands and burly security men and long queues for acts that most people wouldn’t cross the road to see in Dublin. Other Voices has all gone a little too big for its lovely britches, to be honest – at one point this weekend, I will be genuinely concerned for our safety as an impossibly-sized crowd squeeze into Curran’s to see Stephen James Smith and I consider kissing the strangers whose faces are pressed so closely to mine, just to pass the time as we wait for Smith to blow us all away. But The Young Adult is in a new venue and it’s a bit of a hike up the hill, and so her Kerry debut is nicely populated but not rafter-hanging.
They’re a lovely crowd too; older, it seems, than most of the people here and thankfully open to hearing a new artist they’ve never heard of before. Oh, and the guys from The Murder Capital – who are so hot right now – are in the front row, which even I know is pretty cool. I see her for ten seconds before the gig – long enough to tell her to take that daft top-knot out of her hair – ‘you must be the mammy’, another mammy behind me comments – and about five seconds afterwards; a hug, a well done and a glint in her eye that suggests she may well be hungover for her second gig, tomorrow.
She won’t be the only one, of course. While she ends up playing the piano in Benner’s till three in the morning, we finish our night with a failed attempt to get into Nelligan’s – The Youngest will be 18 in two weeks, which is literally two weeks too late for the door staff. There follows a very confusing exchange between Boy and Bouncer, in which the former insists his younger sister is 19, and the latter passes on the number of a taxi. When The Boy rings it – I swear to God I’m not making this up – the controller tells him there are no taxis available, to ‘go away’, and that he’s in ‘Healy-Rae country now’. That I play no effective part in either of these mini-dramas presumably tells you all you need to know about who won that particular drunk contest.
Anyway, her second gig is rammed, and all around us, we can hear people saying very nice things about her. Another brief hug and she’s gone again, and I think it’s at this point that I realise that she may be at Other Voices but she’s not with us at all. We will see her again for all of five minutes after The Wha’, during which exchange a singer from another band will approach her and, right in front of her mother, will invite her to join them ‘to smoke hash by the sea’. It’s quite the moment for all involved.
So she will miss the annual winter pilgrimage around Slea Head on the last day, and how the sun shone low and beautiful over the Blaskets, and how cold the water at Béal Bán was when I plunged my hands into it. And she will have to wait till we get back to hear about the singer from The Murder Capital crowd surfing in Nellie Freds and seeing Stephen James Smith for a second time in Tig Bric and all the other wonderful, out-of-this-world stuff that happens in this magical place in December. It might be too big, it might be too crowded, it might be Healy-Rae country. But it’s West Kerry, stupid. Where else on God’s Green Earth would you possibly want to be?